No More Learning

"Oh, it can be put into words, all right, provided one means it. " "I don't seem to have the knack. But let me tell you a sto:ry. " "Another sto:ry! You seem to go in for telling stories like Great
Homer himself! " Hans was taking an even ruder and more arrogant tone. Gerda gave him a pleading look. But Ulrich would not let him- self be put off, and went on: "I was ve:ry much in love myself once, when I was just about the same age as you are now. Actually, I was in lo~ewith being in love, with my changed condition, rather than with the woman in the case, and that was when I found out all about the things you, your friends, and Gerda make such great mysteries of. That's the sto:ry I wanted to tell you. "
They were both startled that it turned out to be so short a sto:ry.
"So you were ve:ry much in love once . . . ? '' Gerda asked haltingly, and hated herself in that instant for having asked the question in front of Hans, with the shivering curiosity of a schoolgirl.
But Hans broke in: "Why are we talking about that sort of thing in the first place? Why don't you tell us instead what your cousin is really up to, now that she has fallen in with all those . cultural bankrupts? "
"She is searching for an idea that will give the whole world a splen- did image ofwhat our count:ry stands for," Ulrich replied. "Wouldn't you like to help her out with some suggestion of your own? I'd be glad to pass it on to her. "
Hans gave a scornful laugh. "Why do you act as if you didn't know that we intend to disrupt the whole show? "
"But why on earth are you so much against it? "
"Because it is an incredibly vicious scheme against all that's Ger- man in this count:ry,'' Hans said. "Is it possible that you -really don't know what a strong opposition is developing? The Pan-Gennan League has been alerted to your Count Leinsdorf's machinations. The Physical Culture Clubs have already lodged a protest against this affront to German aspirations. The Federation of Arms-bearing Stu- dent Corps throughout our Austrian universities is formulating an
appeal against the threat of Slavification, and the League of Gennan Youth, ofwhich I am a member, will not put up with it, even ifwe have to take to the streets! " Hans had drawn himself up tall and re- cited this speech with a certain pride. But he could not resist adding: "Not that any of this makes any difference. These people all make too much of externals. What matters is that there's no way of getting anything done to anyone's satisfaction in this country! " ·
Ulrich asked him to explain.
The great races of mankind had all begun by creating their own mythology. ·Well, was there such a thing as a great myth of Austria? Hans asked. Did Austria have an ancient religion of its own, or a great epic poem? Neither the Catholic nor the Protestant religion had originated here; the art of printing and the Austrian tradition of painting had all come from Gennany. The reigning dynasty had come from Switzerland, Spain, Luxembourg; the technology from England and Gennany; our· most beautiful cities, Vienna, Prague, Salzburg, had been built by Italians or Germans; the anny was orga- nized on the Napoleonic model. Such a country had no business try- ing to take the lead. Its only possible salvation had to be union with Gennany. "Satisfied? " Hans concluded.
Gerda was not sure whether to be proud of him or ashamed. Her attraction to Ulrich had been flaring up again oflate, even though the natural human need to be someone in her own right was much better served by her younger friend. This young woman was strangely tom between the contradictory inclinations to grow old as a virgin and to give herself to Ulrich. The second of these inclinations was the natu- ral consequence of a love she had felt for years, though it never burst into flame but only smoldered listlessly inside her, and her feelings were like those of someone infatuated with an inferior, in that her soul was humiliated by her body's contemptible craving for submis- sion to this man. In strange contrast with this, though perhaps tied to it as simply and naturally as a yearning for peace, she suspected that she would never marry but would end up, when all the dreams were over, leading a solitary, quietly busy life of her own. This W! lS not a hope hom of conviction, for Gerda had no very clear idea of herself, only a foreboding such as the body may have long before the mind is alerted to it. The influence Hans had on her was part of it. Hans was a colorless young man, bony without being tall or strong, who tended
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to wipe his hands on his hair or his clothes and peer, whenever possi- ble, into a small round tin-framed pocket mirror because he was al- ways troubled by some new eruption of his muddy skin. But this, with the possible exception of the pocket mirror, was exactly how Gerda pictured the early Roman Christians, forgathering in their un- derground catacombs in defiance of their persecutors. It was not an exact correspondence of details that she meant, after all, but the basic general feeling of terror shared with the early Christian mar- tyrs, as she saw them. Actually, she found the well-scrubbed and scented pagans more attractive; but taking sides with the Christians was a sacrifice one owed to one's character. For Gerda the lofty de- mands of conscience had thereby acquired a moldy, slightly revolting smell, which went perfectly with the mystical. outlook Hans had opened up to her.
Ulrich was quite conversant with this outlook. We should perhaps feel indebted to spiritualism for satisfying-with its funny rappings from the Beyond so suggestive of the minds of deceased kitchen
·maids-that crude metaphysical craving for spooning up, ifnot God, then at least the spirits, like some food icily slipping down one's gul- let in the dark. In earlier centuries this longing for personal contact with God or His cohorts, said to occur in a state of ecstasy, did, de- spite the subtle and sometimes marvelous forms it took, make for a mixture of crude earthliness with experiences of an exceptional and ineffable condition of psychic awareness. The metaphysical was thus the physical, embedded in this intuitive state, a mirror image of earthly longings, believed to reveal whatever the concepts of those times encouraged people to expect that they would see. But it is just such concepts that change with the times and lose their credibility. If nowadays anyone told a story of God speaking to him personally, seizing him painfully by the hair to lift him up to Himself, or slipping into his breast in some numinous, intensely sweet way, no one would take any of these details. embodying the experience literally, least of all God's professional functionaries, ~ho, as children of a scientific age, feel an understandable horror of being compromised by hysteri- cal and maniacal adherents. Consequently we must either regard such experiences, of frequent and well-recorded occurrence in the Middle Ages and in classical antiquity, as delusions and pathological phenomena, or face the possibility that there is something to them,
something independent of the mythical terms in which it has hith- erto been expressed: a pure kernel of experience, in other words, that would have to pass strict empirical tests of credibility, where- upon it would of course become a matter of overriding importance long before anyone could deal with the next question, what conclu- sions to draw from this with regard to our relation. ship to the Beyond. And while faith based on theological reasoning is today universally engaged in a bitter struggle with doubt and resistance from the pre- vailing brand of rationalism, it does seem that the naked fundamen- tal experience itself, that•primal seizure of mystic insight, stripped of all the traditional, terminological husks of faith. freed from ancient religious concepts, perhaps no longer to be regarded as a religious
. experience at all, has undergone an immense expansion and now forms the soul of that complex irrationalism that haunts our era like a night bird lost in the dawn.
An absurd splinter of this manifold movement was in f~ct repre- sented by the social cirele or vortex in which Hans Sepp was playing his part. If one were to tabulate the ideas that ebbed and flowed within that company-though this would be against their principles, as they were against numbering and measuring things-the first one
would have been a timid and quite Platonic call for trial or·compan- ionate marriage, in fact for the sanctioning of polygamy and polyan- dry; next, when it came to art, they favored the most abstract, aiming at the universal and the timeless, then called Expressionism, which disdained mere appearances or the shell, the banal externals of things, the faithful, "naturalistic" delineation of which had oddly enough been regarded as revolutionary only one generation earlier. Cheek by jowl with this abstract aim of capturing the essential vision of the mind and the world, without bothering about externals, there was also a taste for the down-to-earth and limited kind of art, the so-called regional and folk arts; the promotion ofwhich these young people regarded as a sacred duty to their Pan-Germanic souls; thes·e and others were just some of the choice straws and grasses picked up beside the road of time to be woven into a nest for the human spirit, most particularly the most luxuriant ideas of the rights, duties, and creative promise of the young, which played so great a role that they must be considered in more detail.
The present era, they argued, was blind to the rights ofyoung peo-
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ple; a person had virtually no rights until he or she had come of age. Fathers, mothers, or guardians could dress, house, feed such a per- son as they Jiked, reprimand or punish and even, according to Hans Sepp, wreck the child's life, so long as they did not overstep some far-off provision of the law, which granted to a child no more protec- tion than it did to a domestic animal. The child is owned by its par- ents as a chattel and is, by virtue of its economic dependence on them, a piece of property, a capitalist object. This "capitalist dehu- manization of the child," which Hans had picked up somewhere in his reading and·then elaborated for himself, was the first lesson he taught his astonished disciple, Gerda, who·had until then felt quite well taken care of at home. Christianity had somewhat lightened the wife's yoke, but not that ofthe daughter, who was condemned to veg- etate at home by being forcibly kept away from real life. After this prelude, he indoctrinated her in the child's right to educate itself ac- cording to the laws of its own persoqality. The child was creative, it was growth personified and constantly engaged in creating itself. The child was regal by nature, hom to impose its ideas, feelings, and fan- tasies on the world;-oblivious to the ready-made world of accidentals, it made up its own ideal world. It had its own sexuality. In destroying creative originality by stripping the child ofits own world, suffocating it with the dead stuff of traditional learning, and training it for spe- cific utilitarian functions alien to its nature, the adult world commit- ted a· barbaric sin. The child was ·not goal-oriented-it created through play, its work was play and tender growth; when not deliber- ately interfered with, it took on nothing that was not utterly absorbed into its nature; every object it touched was a living thing; the child
was a world, a cosmos unto itself, in touch with the ultimate, the ab- solute, even though it could not express it. But the child was killed by being taught to serve worldly purposes and being chained to the vul- gar routines so falsely called reality! So said Hans s. epp. He was all of twenty-one when he brought his_ doctrines to the House of Fischel, and Gerda was no younger. In addition, Hans had been fatherless for a long time by then, and felt free at all times to bully his mother, who
:was supporting him and the rest of her children by keeping a small shop, so that there seemed to be no direct cause for his philosophy of the child as helpless victip1 of tyranny.
Gerda, absorbing these teachings of Hans, accordingly wavered
between a mild pedagogical urge to raise a future generation in their own light, and putting them to more immediate and direct use in her war upon Leo and Clementine. Hans Sepp; however, stood more firmly on his principles and on his slogan "Let us all be children! " That he clung so fiercely to a child's embattled stance might have originated in an early craving for independence, but he basically owed it to the fact that the language of the youth movement then coming into vogue was the first that helped his soul to find its tongue, and it led him, as any true language does, from one word to the next, each word saying more than the speaker had actually intended. And so the original call for a return to childhood gave rise to the most important insights. For the child should not go counter to its nature, renouncing it for the sake of becoming a father or a mother, which means only becoming a bourgeois, a slave of this world, tied hand and foot, and turned into a "useful" object. What ages people is their social conformism; the child resists being turned into a citizen, and so the objection that a twenty-one-year-old is not supposed to be- have like a child is swept away, because this struggle goes on from birth to old age and is ended only when the conventional world is overturned by the world of love. This was the higher aspect of Hans Sepp's doctrine, on all of which Ulrich had been kept informed by Gerda.
It was he who had discovered the link between what these young people called their love, or, alternatively, their community, and the consequences of a peculiar, wildly religious, unmythologically mythi- cal (or merely infatuated) state, and it touched him deeply, though they did not know it, because he confined himself to making fun of its manifestations in them. In the same vein he now answered Hans by asking him point-blank why he would not take advantage of the Parallel Campaign for advancing the cause of his "Community of the Purely Selfless. "
"Because it's out of the question," Hans replied.
The resulting conversation between them would have been as baf- fling to an uninitiated listener as an exchange in criminal street slang, although it was no more than the pidgin of social infatuation. So what follows is more the gist of what was said than a literal transcription of it. The Community of the Purely Selfless was what Hans called it; despite this, it was not devoid of meaning; the more selfless a person
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feels, the brighter and intenser the things of this world appear; the more weight a person sheds, the more he feels uplifted; everyone has probably experienced this at one time or another, though such expe- riences must not be confused with mere gaiety, cheerfuh1ess, light- heartedness, or the like, which are simply substitutes for it, serving a lower or even some corrupt purpose. Perhaps the real thing should be called not a state of uplift but rather a shedding of one's armor, that armor in which the ego was encased. You had to distinguish be- tween the two walls pressing in on the human being. Man succeeds in getting over the first rampart every time he does something kind and unselfish, but that is only the lesser rampart. The greater wall equals the selfhood ofeven the most unselfish person; this is original sin as such; with us, every sensation, every feeling, even that of self- surrender, is more a taking than a giving, and there is hardly any way of shaking off this armor of all-permeating selfishness. Hans ticked off specifics: Knowledge is simply the appropriation of something not our ~wn. We kill, tear, and digest our "object" as an animal does its prey. A concept is a living thought killed, never to stir again. A conviction is an impulse of faith, frozen into some unchanging life- less form. Research confirms the known. Character is inertia, the re- fusal to keep growing. To know a person amounts to no longer being moved by that person. Insight is one-way vision. Truth is the success- ful effort to think impersonally and inhumanly. Everywhere, the in- stinct to kill, to freeze, to clutch, to petrify, is a mixture. of self-seeking with a cold, craven, treacherous mock-selflessness. "And when," Hans wanted to know, even though the innocent Gerda was all he had experienced, "when has love ever been anything but pos- session, or the giving of oneself as its quid pro quo? "
Ulrich cautiously and with qualifications professed to agree with all these none too coherent assertions. He allowed that even suffer- ing and renunciation yielded a slight profit for the ego; ·a faint, as it were grammatical cast of egotism shadowed all we did as long as there was no predicate without a subject.
But Hans would have none ofthat! He and his friends argued end- lessly about the right way to live. Sometimes they assumed that ev- eryone had to live first and foremost for himself and only then for all the others; or else they agreed that a person could have only one true friend, who, however, needed his own one friend, so that they saw
the community as a circular linking of souls, like the spectrum or other chains of being; but what they most liked to believe was that there was such a thing as a communal soul; it might be overshadowed by the forces of egotism, but it was a deep, immense source of vital energy, its potential unimaginable and waiting to be tapped. A tree fighting for its life in the sheltering forest cannot feel more unsure of itself than sensitive people nowadays feel about the dark warmth of the mass, its dynamism, the invisible molecular process of its uncon- scious cohesion, reminding them with every breath they take that the greatest and the least among them are not alone. Ulrich felt the same. While he perceived clearly that the tamed egotism on which life is built inakes for an orderly structure, compared with which the single breath of all mankind is no more than the quintessence of murky thinking, and while for his part he preferred keeping to him- self, he could not help feeling oddly moved when Gerda's young friends talked in their extravagant fashion of the great wall that had to be surmounted.
Hans now reeled offthe articles ofhis faith in a drone interspersed with bursts of vehemence, his eyes staring straight ahead without seeing anything. An unnatural c~ack ran through the cosmos, break- ing it in two like the two halves of an apple, which consequently start to shrivel up. Which was why, nowadays, we had to regain by artifi- cial and unnatural means what had once been a natural part of our- selves. But this split could be healed by opening up the self, by a change of attitude, for the more a person could forget himself, blot himself out, get away from himself, the more his energy could be freed for the common good, as though released from a bad chemical combination; and the closer he drew to the community, the more he would realize his true self, because, as Hans saw it, true. originality was not a matter of empty uniqueness but came from opening one- self up, degree by degree, to participation and devotion, perhaps all the way to the ultimate degree of total communion with the world achieved by those dissolved in selflessness.
These propositions so devoid of content set Ulrich to wondering how they might possibly be substantiated, but all he did was to ask Hans coolly just how all this opening up of one's ·self and so forth might be done in actual practice.
Hans came up with some prodigious words for it: the transcendent
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ego in place ofthe sensu~ego, the Gothic ego instead ofthe natural- istic one, the realm of being rather than the realm of phenomena or appearances, the unconditional experience, and similar formidable expressions, which had to do duty for his sense of the indescribable reality he envisioned, as they all too often must, incidentally, to the detriment of the cause they somehow manage to enhance nonethe- less. And because this condition ofwhich he had occasional, p~rhaps even frequent, glimpses never stayed in focus for more than a few brief instants of meditation, he went even further and claimed that ! ranscendence nowadays simply did not manifest itself other than sporadically, in flashes of an extracorporeal vision that was naturally hard to pin down, except perhaps in the traces it left in gr'eat works of art, which led him on to the symbol, his favorite word both for art and for other supernaturally towering signs of life, and finally to the Germanic gift, peculiar to those who carried even a smattering of Germanic blood in their veins, for creating and envisioning said things. Using this sublime variant of "good old days" nostalgia made it easy for him to suggest that a lasting perception of the essence of things was a thing of the past and deriied to the present time, an as- sertion from which the whole debate had after all sprung.
Ulrich found this superstitious claptrap rather irritating. He ·had been wondering for a long time what it was that Gerda actually saw in Hans. There she sat, with her pale look, taking no active part in the conversation. Hans Sepp had a grandiose theory of love, in which she probably found the deeper meaning of her own existence. Ulrich now gave the conversation a new tum by stating-not without a pro- test against having to carry on this kind of talk in the first place-that the highest intensity of feeling ofwhich a person was capable did not arise out of one's usual egotistic31 appropriation of whatever came one's way or, as Hans and his friends felt, out of what is called self- enhancement through self-surrender, but was actually a state of rest, of changelessness, like still waters.
At this Gerda brightened up and asked what he meant.
Ulrich told her that Hans had actually been talking all this time, even when he went out ofhis way to disguise it, about love and noth- ing but love; saintly love, solitary love," the love that overflows its banks of desire, the love always described as a loosening, a dissolu-
tion, indeed a reversal of all earthly bonds, in any case no longer a mere emotion but a transformation of a person's whole way of think- ing and perceiving.
Gerda looked at him as though she were trying to decide whether this man who knew so much more than she did had somehow discov- ered this too, or whether this man she was secretly in love with and who sat beside her without revealing much of himself was emitting some strange sympathetic radiation that draws two people together even when their bodies do not touch.
Ulrich felt her probing look. It was as though he were speaking some foreign tongue in which he could go on fluently, but only su- perficially, because the words had no roots inside him.
"In this state," he said, "in which one oversteps the limits normally imposed on one's actions, one understands everything, because the soul accepts onlywhat is already part ofit; in a sense, it already knows all that's coming its way. Lovers have nothing new to say to each other; nor do they actually recognize each other; all that a lover recognizes is the indescribable way in which he is inwardly activated by the beloved. To recognize a person he does not love means draw- ing that person into the sphere of his love like a blank wall with the sunlight on it. To recognize some inanimate object doesn't mean de- coding its characteristics one by one; it means that a veil falls away or a barrier is lifted, somewhere beyond the world of the senses. Even the inanimate, unknown as it is, enters trustfully into the shared life of lovers. Nature and the spirit peculiar to love gaze into each other's eyes, two versions of the same act, a flowing in two directions, a burning at both ends. Awareness of a person or thing apart from one- selfthen becomes impossible, for to take notice is to take something from the things noticed; they keep their shape but tum to ashes in- side; something evaporates from them, leaving only their mummies. For lovers there is no such thing as a truth-it could only be a blind alley, the finish, the death ofsomething that, while it lives, is like the breathing edge of a flame, where light and darkness lie breast-to- breast. How can any one thing light up, in recognition, where all is light? Who needs the beggarly small change of security and proof where everything spills over in superabundance? And how can one still want anything for oneself alone, even the beloved itself, once
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one knows how those who love no longer belong to themselves but must give themselves freely, four-eyed intertwined creatures that they are, to everything that comes their way? "
Anyone who has mastered the idiom can run on in this vein with-. out even trying. It is like walking with a lighted candle that sheds its tender rays on one aspect of life after another, all of them looking as iftheir usual appearance in the hard light ofcommon day had been a crude misrepresentation. How impossible it becomes, for instance, to apply that verbal gesture "to possess" to lovers, once one remem- bers the etymology (from potts and sedere, i. e. , pos-sess equals "to sit upon," "be-set"). Does it show desires of a higher order, to aim at "pos-sessing" principles, the respect of one's children, ideas, one- self? But this clumsy ploy of a heavy animal subduing its prey with the full weight ofits own body is still, and rightly, the basic and favor- ite tenn of capitalism, showing the connection between the posses- sors of the social world and the possessors of knowledge and skills, which is what it makes of its thinkers and artists, while love and as- ceticism stand apart in their lonely kinship. How aimless this pair ap- pears, how devoid of a target, compared with the aims and targets of nonnallife. But the tenns. "aim" and "target" derive from the lan- guage of the marksman. To be without aim or target must have meant, originally, not to be out to kill. So merely by tracking down the clues in language itself-a blurred, but revealing trail! -one can see how a crudely changed meaning has· everywhere usurped the function of far subtler messages now quite lost to us, that ever-per- ceptible but never quite tangible nexus ofthings. Ulrich gave up pur- suing this idea Ol! t loud, but Hans could not be blamed for thinking that all he had to do was tug at a certain thread to unravel the whole fabric; the world had merely lost its instinct for the right thread to pull. He had been repeatedly interrupting Ulrich and finishing his sentences for him.
"If you choose to look at all this with a scientific eye, you'll see nothing more in it than any bank teller might. All empirical explana- tions are deceptive, they never take us beyond the level of crude sen- sory data. Your need to know would like to reduce the world ·to nothing more than . the so-called forces of nature twiddling their thumbs. ," These were Hans's objections, his interpolations. He alter- nated between rudeness and passion. He felt that he had done a poor
job of stating his case, and blamed his failure on the presence of this interloper between him and Gerda, for had he been alone with Gerda, eye-to-eye with her, the same words would have risen sky- ward like a shimmering fountain, like spiraling falcons. He knew it, he felt that this was one of his days. He was also surprised and an- noyed to hear Ulrich talking so fluently and so intently in his place.
Actually, Ulrich wa5 not speaking as a scientist at all but was saying far more than he would have been prepared to defend, although he was not saying anything he did not believe. He was carried away by a suppressed fury. To run on like this he had to be in a curiously ele- vated, a rather inflamed frame of mind, and Ulrich's mood was somewhere between this state and the one induced by seeing Hans, with his greasy, bristling hair, his muddy skin, his repellent emphatic gestures, and his foaming torrent of speech in which some filmy frag- ment of his true self hung trapped, like the skin from a flayed heart. But strictly speaking, Ulrich had been suspended all his life between two such aspects ofthis subject, always readyto expound it as he was doing, half believing what he was saying but never going beyond such verbal games, because he did not really take them for real, and so his discomfiture was keeping step with his pleasure in this conversation.
Gerda ignored the mocking asides that he injected into his talk from time to time as a kind of self-parody, overwhelmed as she was by her sense of his opening himself up at last. She looked at him with a touch of anxiety. He's much softer than he'll ever admit, she thought, with a feeling that broke down her own defenses, as if a baby were groping at her breast. Ulrich caught her eye. He knew almost everything that was going on between her and Hans, because "in her worry she needed to relieve her heart by at least throwing out hints ofher problems, and that made it easy enough for Ulrich to fill in the rest. She and Hans regarded the act ofphysical possession, the normal preoccupation ofyoung lovers, as a despicable surrender to capitalist urges; they thought they despised physical passion alto- gether, but they also despised self-control as a middle-class virtue, so what it came to was their always clinging to each other in a nonphysi- cal or semiphysical way. They tried to "accept" each other, as they called it, and felt that trembling, tender merging oftwo people lost in each other's eyes, slipping into the invisible currents that ripple through each other's heads and hearts, and feeling, at the apparent
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moment of mutual understanding, that each holds the other inside himself and is at one with the o~er. At less exalted times they were satisfied with ordinary mutual admiration, seeing in great paintings or dramatic scenes the parallels to their own condition and marvel- ing, when they kissed, at the thought that-as the saying goes-mil- lennia were gazing down upon them. They did kiss, even though they regarded the crude physical sensations of love, that spasm of the bodily self, as no better than a stomach cramp, but their limbs did not pay too much attention to their ideals and pressed hard against each other on their own. Afterward they both felt bewildered. Their budding philosophy was not proof against their heady sense of no- body watching, the dim lights, the furiously mounting attraction of two young bodies nestling close together, and Gerda especially, who as the girl was the more mature of the two, felt the craving to GOD- summate their embrace with the innocent intensity a tree might feel on being prevented from budding in the springtime. This arrested lovemaking, as bland as the kisses oflittle children and as intermina- ble as the aimless fondlings of the old, always left them feeling shat- tered.
Hans found it easier to take because he could always regard it afterward as a successful test of his convictions.
"It isn't for us to have and to hold," he lectured her. 'We are nomads who must keep moving onward, step after step. " And when he noticed that Gerda's whole body was quivering with frustrated de- sire, he made no bones about calling it a weakness, if not actually a residue ofher non-Germanic genes, and felt like Adam walking with his God, his manly heart having once more resisted his erstwhile rib's tempting of his faith. At such moments Gerda despised him. Which was probably why she had told Ulrich so much about it, at least in the beginning. She suspected that a full-grown man would do both more and less than Hans, who would bury his tear-stained face in her lap like a child after he had insulted her. Since she was just as proud of her experiences as she was bored with them, she let Ulrich in on all this in the anxious hope that he would find something to say that would put an end to the agoni$g beauty ofit.
Ulrich, however, seldom spoke to her as she wished he might; in- stead, he cooled her offwith his sardonic tone, because even though it made Gerda more reserved, he knew too well that she longed to submit to him, and that neither Hans nor anyone else had the power
over her mind he could have if he chose. He justified himself with the thought that any other real man in his place would have the same effect on Gerda, that of a blessed relief after that woolly-minded dirty little tease Hans. But even as he was thinking it over, suddenly seeing it all in perspective, Hans had collected himself and started a fresh attack.
"All in all," he said, "you've made the biggest possible mistake by trying to express as a concept something that occasionally elevates an idea somewhat above the level of the merely conceptual. But I sup- pose that's what makes the difference between one of you intellec- tual people and the likes of us. First," he added proudly, "one must learn to ll. ve it before one can, perhaps, learn to think it. " When Ul- rich ~miled at this, he flashed out like a bolt of lightning: "Jesus was a seer at the age of twelve, without first getting his doctorate. "
This provoked Ulrich into breaking the silence he owed to Gerda by giving Hans a piece of advice that betrayed his knowledge of facts he could have learned only from her. "I don't know why," he said, "if you want to live it, you don't go all the way. I would take Gerda in my arms, forget all the qualms of my rational mind, and keep her locked in my arms until our bodies either crumbled to ashes or became transformed into the fullness of their own being in a way that is beyond our power of comprehension! "
Hans, feeling a stab ofjealousy, looked not at him but at Gerda, who turned pale with embarrassment. Ulrich's words about locking' her in his arms had touched her like a secret promise. At the moment she didn't care at all how "the other life" was to be imagined, and she felt sure that Ulrich would do everything just as it should be done, if he really wanted to. Hans, incensed at Gerda's betrayal, argued against Ulrich's proposal, which could not be carried out success- fully, he said, because the time was not ripe. The first souls to take flight would have to take off from a mountain, just like the first air- planes, and not from the lowlands of a period like the present. Per- haps there must first come a man who would release mankind from its bondage before it could achieve the heights. It was not unthink- able that he might be the man himself, but that was his own affair, and apart from this, the present low level of spiritual development was incapable ofproducing such a man.
Now Ulrich remarked on the proliferation of redeemers these
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days-indeed, every self-respecting chairman of a social club seemed to be eligible. If Christ were to come again tomorrow, he would certainly fare worse than the first time. The better newspapers and book clubs would fmd him vulgar, and the great international press would hardly be likely to welcome him to its columns.
With this they were back where they had started, the discussion had come full circle, and Gerda sank back into herself.
Yet something had changed; without giving any outward sign ofit, Ulrich had tripped himself up a little. His thoughts had parted com- pany with his words. He looked at Gerda. Her body was angular, her skin looked dull and tired. That faint breath ofold-maidishness that hung over her had suddenly become apparent to him, although it had probably always been the major factor holding him back fro111 ever coming to the point with this girl who was in love with him. Of course, Hans also had something to do with it, what with the semi- physical nature of his communal utopia, which had an old-maidish quality ofits own. Ulrich did not feel attracted to Gerda, but even so he was inclined to continue his dialogue with her. This reminded him that he had invited her to come to see him. She gave no sign ofeither remembering this invitation or of having forgotten it, and he got no opportunity to ask her about it privately. It left him with an uneasy sense ofregret as-well as ofrelief, such as one feels when one skirts a danger recognized too late.
114
THINGS ARE COMING TO A BOIL. ARNHEIM IS GRACIOUS TO GENERAL STUMM. DIOTIMA PREPARES TO MOVE OFF INTO INFINITY. ULRICH DAYDREAMS ABOUT LIVING ONE'S LIFE AS ONE READS A BOOK
His Grace had urged Diotima to find out about the famous Makart pageant, which had brought all Austria together in the 1870s in a burst of national fervor; he still had vivid memories of the richly draped carriages, the heavily caparisoned horses, the trumpeters, and the pride people took in their medieval costumes, which lifted them out of their humdrum daily lives. It was this that had brought Diotima, Amheim, and Ulrich to go through the materials on the pe- riod at the Imperial Library, from which they were now emerging together. As Diotima, her lip curling with disdain, had predicted to His Grace, what they had come up with was quite impossible; such frippery could no longer make people forget the monotony of their existence. They were still on the library stairs when the beauty in- formed her companions that she felt like making the most of the sunny day and the year 1914-which in the few weeks ofits existence had already left the moldering past so far behind-by walking home. But they had no sooner stepped out into the light of day when they bumped into the General, on his way in. Proud to be discovered on· such a mission of high learning, he instantly offered to tum back and enlarge Diotima's entourage by joining it. This made Diotima realize after only a few steps that she was tired and wanted a cab. With no such vehicle in sight, they all stopped in front of the library, which faced a trough-shaped rectangular square, three sides ofwhich were formed by splendid ancient fa~ades, while on the fourth the asphalt street in front of a long, low palace shimmered like an ice rink, with cars and carnages rushing past, none ofwhich responded to the four people waving and signaling to them like survivors of a shipwreck,
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until they tired of it and forgot about giving anything but the occa- sional halfhearted signal in the direction of the traffic.
Arnheim had a big book under his arm. He was pleased with this gesture, both condescending and respectful toward the life of the mind. He greeted the General eagerly: "How nice to see you coming to the library too; men of position nowadays so seldom seek out the life of the mind in its own house. ".
General Stumm replied that he was quite at home in this library.
Arnheim was impressed. "Almost all we have nowadays is writers, and hardly anyone who reads books an:ymore," he went on. "Do you realize, Ge~eral, how many books are printed annually? I think it's over a hundred books a day published ill Germany alone. Over a thousand periodicals are founded every year. The whole world is writing! Everyone helps himself to ideas as though they were his own, all the time. Nobody feels any respansibility toward the situa- tion as a whole. Ever since the Church lost its influence, there is no central authority to stem our general chaos. There is no educational model, no educational principle. In these circumstances it is only natural that feeling and morality should drift without an anchor, and the most stable person begins to waver. "
The General felt his mouth turning dry. It wasn't as though Dr. Arnheim was actually addressing him in person; he was a man stand- ing in the square and thinking out loud. The General thought of how many people talk to themselves in the street, on their way to some- where; civilians, of course, because a soldier who did such a thing would be locked up, and an officer would be sent to the psychiatric clinic. Stumm felt embarrassed at the thought of standing there phi- losophizing in public, as it were, smack-dab in the middle of the Im- perial Residential capital. Apart from the two men, there seemed to be only one other, a mute figure ofbronze standing on a stone pedes- tal in the sunny square. The General had only just noticed this monu- ment and did not remember whom it represented, so that he had to apologize for his ignorance when Arnheim asked him.
"And to think that he was put here to. be venerated," the great man remarked. "But that's how it is. Every moment of our lives we move among institutions, problems, and challenges of which we have barely caught the tail end, so that the present is constantly reaching into the past. We keep crashing through the floor, if I may put it so,
into the cellars of time, even while we imagine ourselves to be occu- pying the top floor of the present. "
Amheim smiled. " He was making conversation. His moving lips flickered in the sunshine, and the lights in his eyes kept changing like those on a signaling steamer. Stumm was growing uneasy; he found it hard to keep acknowledging so many and such unusual turns in 'the conversation while being served up to the world, in full uniform, on this platter of a square. Grass was growing in the cracks between the cobblestones; it was last year's grass but looked implausibly fresh, like a corpse left lying in the snow; it was, in fact, most peculiar and disturbing that grass should be growing here between the stones, when only a few steps farther on the asphalt was being polished, in keeping with the times, by the passing cars. The General began to be troubled by a nervous fear that if he had to go on listening much longer he might suddenly go down on his knees and eat grass in front of the whole world, without knowing why. He looked around for Ul- rich and Diotima for protection.
These two had taken shelter where a thin veil of shade had spun itself around the comer of the wall, and seemed to be involved in an argument, though their voices were too low to be understood.
''You make it sound hopeless," Diotima was saying.
'What do you mean? " Ulrich asked, without real interest.
"There is still such a thing as individuality. " .
Ulrich tried to catch her eye sideways. "Good heavens, we've been
all over this already. "
"You have no heart, or you wouldn't always talk like this," she said
softly. The sun-heated air was rising from the stone pavement up be- tween her legs, which were encased in long skirts like those of a robed statue, inaccessible and to all intents nonexistent. She showed no awareness ofit. It was a caress that had nothing to do with anyone, any man. Her eyes turned pale, but that Inight have been merely the effect of her reserve in a situation where she was exposed to the glances of the passersby. Turning to Ulrich, she said with an effort:
'When a woman has to choose between duty and passion, what can she rely on if not her character? "
"You don't have to choose," Ulrich replied.
· "You go too far; I wasn't speaking of myself," his cousin whispered.
As he did not reply, they both stared across the square fot a while
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in a hostile silence. Then Diotima asked: "Do you think that what we call our soul might emerge from the shadows where it usually keeps itself? "
Ulrich gave her a puzzled look.
"In the case of unusual, specially gifted persons," she added. '~Am I to understand that you're interested in establishing a rap-
port with the Beyond? " Ulrich asked incredulously. "Has Amheim introduced you to a medium? "
Diotima was disappointed in him. "I would never have thought you capable of such a misunderstanding," she said reproachfully. "When I speak of emerging from the shadows, I mean from the un- reality, from that flickering concealment in which we sometimes sense the presence of the unusual. It is spread out like a net that torments us because it will neither hold us nor let us go. Don't you think that there have been times when it was otherWise? When the inner life was a stronger presence, when there were individuals who walked in the light or, as people used to say, walked in holiness, and miracles could happen in reality because they are an ever-present form of another reality, and nothing else! "
Diotima surprised herself by the firmness with whi~h it seemed possible to say this sort of thing, without any special elation, as though she were walking on solid ground. Ulrich felt secretly in- furiated, but actually he was deeply shocked. lias it come to this, he thought, that this giant hen can talk the way I do? Again he saw Di- otima's soul in the shape of a colossal chicken pecking at his own soul, in the shape of a little worm. He was seized by the primal child- hood terror of the giantess, mixed with another strange sensation; there was a certain gratification in be4lg spiritually coJtsumed, as it were, in mindless accord with a kinswoman. Their unanimity was a silly coincidence, of course; he did not believe that there was any magic in being related by blood, nor could he possibly·have taken his cousin seriously even if he were dead drunk. But he had been chang- ing lately, mellowing perhaps; his characteristic inner readiness to move to the ·attack was giving way to a need for tenderness, dreams, kinship, whatever, which also mi}Ilifested itself in sudden outbreaks of the ill will that was its opposite.
Which prompte~him to make fun ofhis cousin now: "Ifthat's how
you feel," he said, "then you ought to go all the way and become Arnheim's lover, openly or in secret, as soon as possible. "
"You shouldn't say such things; I've given you no right! " Diotima rebuked him.
"But I must speak of it. Until now I wasn't sure what was going on between you and Arnheim. But now I understand, and you look to me like a person who is seriously thinking of flying to the moon. I would never have thought you capable of such madness. "
''I've told you that I'm capable of going to extremes. " Her upward gaze was meant to be audacious, but the sun made her screw up her eyes, so that she seemed to be twinkling at him.
"These are the ravings of starved love," Ulrich said, "which pass off when hunger is appeased:" He wondered what Arnheiin's plans might be with regard to her. Did he regret his proposal, and was he covering his retreat by putting on some sort of act? But then he could simply leave and not come back; a man who had been in business all his life would surely have the necessary callousness for that? Here- membered noticing certain signs in Arnheim that indicated passion in an older man; his face was sometimes a grayish yellow, slack and tired, like a room with the bed still unmade at noon. The most likely explanation was the havoc caused by two almost equally strong pas- sions fighting each other to a standstill. But since he was incapable of imagining the passion for power in the degree to which it ruled Am- heim, he could not conceive ofthe measures love had to take in order to fight it.
"You're an odd sort of man," Diotima said. "Always different from what one would expect. Wasn't it you who spoke to me of seraphic love? "
"You regard that as a possibility? " Ulrich asked absentmindedly. "Not as you described it, of course. "
"So Arnheim loves you seraphically? " Ulrich began to laugh softly. "I wish you wouldn't laugh. " Diotima almost hissed at him.
"You don't understand," he apologize& "It's only the excitement. You and Arnheim are sensitive people. You love poetry. I'm sure that you are sometimes touched by a breath . . . a breath of something: the question is just what that is. And now you want to get to the bot- tom of it, with all the thoroughness of your idealism. "
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"Aren't you always saying that one must be precise and thorough? " Diotima countered. .
It was too much. ''You're mad! " he said. "Forgive my saying so, but you are mad. And you of all people mustn't be. "
Meanwhile Arnheim had been telling the General that for the last two generations the world had been undergoing the most profound revolution of all: the end of the soul was in sight.
It gave the Genera! a stab. What the devil, here was yet another problem to think about. To be honest, he ·had thought until this mo- ment, despite Diotima, that there was no such thing as the soul. At military school and in the regiment, nobody gave a hang about this kind of preacher's talk. But here was this manufacturer of guns and tanks, tallCing about. the soul as though he could see it standing there. The General's eyes began to itch and to roll around gloomily, gog- gling at the translucent air around them.
But Arnheim was not waiting to be asked for particulars; words flowed from his lips, from that pale pink slit between his clipped mustache and his little pointed beard. As he phrased it, the soul had started to shrivel and age ever since the Church began to crumble, around the beginning ofthe bourgeois era. Since then it had lost God and all solid values and ideals until the present, when men had actu- ally reached the point of living without morals, without principles, without real experiences, in fact.
The General could not quite see why one could not have experi- ences ifone had no morals. Whereupon Arnheim opened the big vol- ume bound in pigskin that he was holding, revealing an expensive facsimile of a manuscript so valuable that even a mortal of Amheim's extraordinary standing could not be permitted to take the original out of the building. The General saw the depiction of an angel with wings spread horizontally across two pages, against ·a background of dark earth, golden sky, and marvelous colors layered like clouds; he was looking at a reproduction of one of the most moving and splen- did of early medieval paintings, but since he did not know this, while he did know all about bird-hunting and depictions of it, he could only conclude that a creature with wings and a long neck that was neither human nor a snipe must be an aberration to which his companion wished to draw his attention.
Amheim was. pointing his finger at it and saying pensively: "Here
you see what that great lady who is creating the Austrian Campaign is trying to bring back into the world. . . . "
"I see, I see," Stumm said, realizing that he had failed to appreci- ate this thing for what it was and that he had better watch his step.
"The great expressiveness, and with such utter simplicity," Am- heim went on, "bears witness to what our age has lost forever. What is our science compared with this? Patchwork. Our art? Extremes, without~ mediating substance to hold them together. We lack the magic key to unity, and this, you see, is why I am so deeply moved by this Austrian plan to set the world an example of unification, of a shared idea, even though I do not quite believe it can be done. I am a German. Everything in the world today is loud and crude, and Ger- many is the loudest. In every country the people are straining them- selves morning, noon, and night, whether at work or at play, but in Germany they start earlier and stop later than anywhere else. In all the world the spirit of cold calculation and brute force has lost touch with the soul, but we in Germany have the most businessmen and the strongest army in the world. " He looked around the square with delight. "Here in Austria, things have not yet gone so far. The past is still with you, and the people have kept something of their original intuitiveness. Ifthe German spirit can still be saved from rationalism, this is the only place left. from which a start can be made. But I am afraid," he added with a sigh, "we can hardly succeed. A great idea nowadays encounters too much resistance; great ideas just barely help to prevent each other from being misused.